Safe Haven
by Nerumi H
Summary: In which a lonely boy falls in love with a girl who lives in the walls of a dead tower, and a new princess wants her real home back.


.title.: **Safe Haven**

.summary.: **In which a lonely boy falls in love with a girl who lives in the walls of a dead tower, and a new princess wants her real home back.**

.characters.: **Jack Frost / Rapunzel**

.universe.: **Post-Tangled**

.a/n.: **Final entry for Jackunzel week. A bit late, and only on day 6. I'm not sure how to feel about this one, entirely... It could have had a few more things added, but I'd been working on it for so long, I eventually gave in and I'm still rather happy with how it turned out. Enjoy!**

**X**

Jack finds the tower exactly when it needs him. Having been lived in for so long, the sudden impulse of solitude coaxes its own ghosts from the walls as soon as its princess is gone – but he's a little too late to find what _he_ is in need of.

At first it's just a spire stretching in a rusted blade towards the dusk, begging for the challenge of how high he can pile snow to the single window. He's seen a lot of things and this isn't anything new – a combination of kingdom castles and the lonesomeness that is a scent on the air he recognises all too well. He isn't expecting what he meets when he enters the single unlatched window.

It's dim, as if the entire place has been brushed over by a veil of dust that suspends in the air. He strolls through the basic homewares; perpetually invisible or not, he's not too shabby at sensing if there is someone in his proximity. And here, he feels absolutely nothing. It's hollow, even if when he looks around, he can see the soft glow of painted girls watching him from the shadows.

A mirror lays on its side, smashed like the surface of the petals Jack breaks apart with his ice. The shards scatter all around the floor, tiny daggers of begotten threats. A coil of heavy chains writhes with sluggish clanking as his foot nudges at it - blood streaks the ground beneath in a rusted stain, and the inside ring of shackles is darkened in the same hue.

Jack's eyebrows snap up as he sees the newest fascination from this odd place. He tilts his staff to lift the coil of - whatever it is - into his hand, and grazes it through his fingers, the surface soft and stringy. Hair, he automatically mutters, but it's surely far too long.

...Nope, it's certainly hair, he decides after a stupid test of raking his hands through his own snowy locks. What he holds is severed and a dead brown, coiling in wild loops and rushes through the tiny room. There's a strange aura about the way it's so light in his hands - something about it seems far too mystic to be natural hair, and not just because of the atrocious length. It doesn't knot, no matter how far down the acres of chestnut he travels; he reaches a corner of the tower where it lies thick, gathered hectically. Inches away a trapdoor of sorts is slightly open. And beside it, a muddled gag lies discarded.

Jack looks back to the glass, the blood, the chains, and now to this - his stomach flips with an empathy he shouldn't possess for one in his status. He can't help it. Besides being a spirit of snow and cold and death, unseen by those he amuses and those whose lives he breaks apart, he feels connected to this evidence. There isn't much left for him to be connected to, so this digs in hard.

Quietly, Jack regards the tower as if he'll find more horrors. The ceiling arches into a tiny point where he cannot see, crisscrossed with support beams. His eyes, used to the dim (something good comes out of being born from a midnight lake), trace the summery glow of paintings swathed over every single wall.

Jack doesn't know what to do with the mess - he does not want to see it but he can leave even less - so he moves to the alcove for perhaps security, and finds a bedchamber - seemingly the only one the tower holds. It's youthful and bright even in the lightless night, the blankets on the bed purple and silky, draping canopies, soft floors and more of those paintings. Jack spots the single fault of the room: a bureau is tumbled down, the articles atop it scattered like dice.

He likes the bedroom, even if it is awfully girly. It's appropriately lived in…warm, even in the forlorn state of which it is frozen. He often saw the children who played with his snow creations fall so happily into bed, cuddled up with their pillows and dolls to drift into a fantasy-filled sleep where bruises don't exist. He always wondered about it and tried so hard to imitate - how fulfilling did that emptiness exactly feel?

He was too long stuck in this horrendous loop of solitude and hatred - coming upon a hundred years, he aches to recall - and he wonders just how nice slipping away from it must feel. He wonders about the taunting joy of dreams. Is it comfort enough to have the imagination, the false scenario for a few hours or minutes, or does it feel even more excruciating to wake and reflect and say to yourself, "It was all a lie"?

Jack pensively sits on the edge of the bed, touching the lightly ruffled sheets in between his fingers - how often was this slept in? Was it by the person - girl, most likely - with the senselessly long hair? What did she dream about?

For a little, he considers trying to lie down and fall into the remnants of the girl's dream. And then he realizes, a boy accomplishes nothing out of being so profoundly stupid.

If this is any evidence, he needs a new project – there are only so many ways to make someone smile. He needs to start taking care of something whose abandoned gaze won't sting so bad.

He needs to take care of himself.

And this place…he can feel the death here. He doesn't know how, but it seems drawn into the floor, slithering and heavy. But he can also feel hope in the artistic ribboning, veils and veils of love and dreaming.

He decides he will stay here for a little while.

**X**

She's a princess now. She's part of a real fairy tale.

She has her tiara, and her loving parents, and her handsome prince. She had her evil step-mother. The only thing different about her story is that her prince has just as much of a story as she does, and the step-mother was (no matter what they say) her real mother.

Rapunzel fits perfectly in Eugene's hands, even though his confused face doesn't communicate that he thinks the same at the moment. They stand in the middle of the ballroom while the stuffy instructor holds her equally snobby dance partner by the shoulder and the palm. _Loosely have your hand in his,_ she instructs. _You do not grip. You let him hold you._

And she orders steps backwards and forwards, sweeping skirts that Rapunzel's limp petticoat can't imitate. Eugene keeps blowing his hair out of his face and so does she, to the tiny tickling tendrils that flip all the wrong ways. She isn't used to that. She could once push her hair behind her shoulder or pin it away with a paintbrush and it would be fine - until the weight of it pulled it back, that is. But now, nothing except hats can help her, and hats are not allowed.

She finds that a bit unfair, she thinks, as Eugene steps on her toes and smirks apologetically to her mockingly critical look. She finally has the real world in her hands - but there are so many rules. Ways to eat, manners to speak, each step choreographed, even when she isn't learning ballroom dancing. She has to wear these constricting dresses. She must wed Eugene the way the tradition dictates (no animals in the church).

She wants to run away and find her real new world - she wants to play with her pets and sing at the top of her lungs. She wants Pascal and Maximus and her...her freedom back.

A critical snapping reaches her ears. The madame advises in her most terse voice, "Let him lead you. You are a lady."

She looks at Eugene and he shrugs, but then lets her twirl him clumsily out of the ballroom with no regard to the cried instruction anyways.

**X**

He realizes the girl must have been blonde, unless she just really badly wanted to be like a princess (no one is blonde around Corona except for that heir they lost decades ago). The art is mostly of her - it should strike him as narcissistic but something about how the tower is placed so far away from the world makes him excuse her.

He sits on the top rafter and imagines her swinging from a loop of her long, gleaming hair, a dainty brush nimbly dancing across the walls. Flowers, sunsets, birds, rivers of rainbows, halos of jewels, wreaths of poetry. He grazes his fingers against a profile of what she surely looks like - eyes as green as the flourishing grass, lips raspberry pink, hair streaming like liquid gold.

She must have been beautiful. Perhaps she deserved to be narcissistic.

He watches the curves and ebbs of the paint, and eventually his staff lifts and glimmers trails of frost through the figures on the wall. He's gotten quite skilled with it, if he does say so himself, no longer that stumbling ecstatic kid from a century ago; now he can create dewdrops upon the roses, silver pearls at her throat. Every ferny tendril is delicate enough to challenge hers.

He sits back and looks at her. This particular image has her in a dress of yellow, toying with beams of sunlight similar to how he controls the breeze. Maybe the century has finally caught up with him, because he finds himself speaking – "How was it up here, Princess? Aren't people afraid of falling?"

No answer. Of course. He traces a veil of white down her corset, and continues. "Maybe you weren't scared. I'm getting this fearless vibe off of you, you know. Could just be the sketches up there of dragon escape plans." He points above his head, and smirks at her. "And you look so happy all the time. Care to share some of that optimism?"

He clears his throat and settles back, propping his arm over his knees and letting his staff sway unsteadily in his hand from the unequal weight. Snow trails down to the floor in a confection of flakes. He raises an eyebrow at her, shortly flashing a smile. "I mean, it's hard to pick up on things like that when no one can see you. I know, I know; 'Jack, don't bring this up again, it's such a downer. And it's not like you can do anything about it anyways.'" He laughs to himself – perhaps to her – and leans himself to the side until gravity pulls him off the beam. He catches himself by bent knees and hangs upside down from the beam, regarding the rest of the incandescent tower.

Now that he can't see the paint texture, his imagination illustrates her moving and listening, edging closer. Leaning over and sweeping her blonde hair out of her face, perhaps telling him that no, he didn't mention it enough. That's all in your head, Jack.

"You're all in my head, too."

He swings a bit, holding his staff at his shoulders and weaving his arms over it. The floor sure is a far way down. "Sorry, I don't really know how to talk to people. I mean, I don't even have your name yet."

Maybe she sits next to him on the beam, peering over the edge at him. And also maybe she's too quixotic for him to design her script.

"But, okay, one more thing. Then I'm done. Then I'll leave you alone about this." Jack sighs, watching the snow sweep into a distraught little whirlwind at the floor, "Where do you find the answer to being happy? Like, really happy. Everything I see tells me that you get it from other people – being with them and needing them and having them need you. Especially the last one. And that really doesn't leave me with many options, does it? I mean, I'm gonna be alive for who the hell knows how long after this, and the most I've got is the moon – who's a stuffy tool, by the way, so I thank you for being more aligned with the sun, yes I noticed that – and myself."

He pauses. The tower's paintings all merge in a yellow blur, undulating sunlight, blonde like her hair as if she's decided with that fearless heart to sit precariously upside down beside him.

"And you. I guess I got you."

He sighs breezily to himself. It's all rather pathetic, he wants to say, but the fact that he's never had something so close to a listener as this shuts him up. Pathetic, yes. Can he trash it because of that title, definitely not.

Keeping to his word, he lifts himself to the air and continues his decor upon her works. For moments, he can feel weightless again - he hears her whispering her ideas, the sweet smile as she completes a mural. She smells like paints the colours of her dress and flowers. Silver springs from the veins of the tower; a jeweled crown sparkling as brightly as the sun and stars together, virgin and delicate, tempting to shatter if only to hear the sweet music of their demise.

He soars from corner to corner with a heady glow surrounding him, her laughter confined to these walls and rebounding around him - she grins so joyously in the paintings and he rushes through her story. She dances, she sings, she cherishes, she loves, _she lives._ Sun-shaped rays flow from her hands - days ago, years ago - and he can hear her humming as she tends to her flowers. Her eyes glow like softly hued lanterns. She is confined to this tower, her days spent painting, but still, he knows as he touches the small dimples in her cheeks, she can still be so happy.

He spirals down through the room, exalted by her and awed by her freedom within herself. A thousand girls before him, all a mirage, all so much more than him, and all seeing him.

And then, through his spiritless magic, he can feel the reflections of desolation slithering beneath him - they mold into his hands and he feels the blood soak her breast, the chains cuff her tiny wrists, the gag force away her smile. Glass severs her golden, sun-spun hair. The stink of blood flows through his veins like smoke until the beautiful glimmering becomes daggers through her heart and the rape of blizzards.

He fears she may have died, and it's the most alone he's ever felt.

**X**

She's going home today.

Well, home… She isn't sure what to call it. She is trying to convince herself it was a prison, but when everything she does was learned there, how can she think that? That tower is the reason she knows how to cook, read, paint, and be alone without feeling too lonely. She wouldn't know that last part if Eugene wasn't her opposite in that respect. For all his hype about being a lone thief, she realizes there is a reason more than tactical advantage for why he was partners with the Stabbington twins for so long – he gets restless if he's alone for too long, having grown up with so many people to take care of, which makes her feel even worse about leaving him behind today.

If he knew she was going to the tower, she doesn't think he'd understand. All that place is for him is where she was imprisoned and where he died. Almost died. He's back now, and more amazing than she could ever think of him to be, but he is not the replacement for what her life was before.

Maximus knows the way through the forest – she enjoys the view that lazily passes her, the brightest greens she's seen in a long while, the freshest earthiest scents, making her think of the first day she'd finally left her tower. That moment had been so full of freedom and she can still feel her the swells of her heart in the tracing of that memory – it hasn't come to her so potently for a long while, but now that she's out here again, it's like she can relive that day.

When the tower comes into view, she remembers how that day her back was to it, and here she is now, returning.

"Around that way, Max," she lightly requests, pointing over the horse's head to the right side of the tower. She wants to circle around, because she knows what lies beneath the tower window. Dust or not, she can never fool herself as to what that witch's ashes used to be. She was the one who taught her those things, including loneliness.

When they breach the spill of rubble at the back of the tower, she slides from Max's bare back and gives his neck a short hug. She pulls back, strokes his nose, and says with his expressive brown eyes attentively regarding her, "Can you stay here for a bit?"

Max shortly snorts an expression of his distaste.

Rapunzel pouts at him jokingly. "Please? Pascal and Eugene would worry too much, you know that. You're the only one I can trust when it comes to this. So please, please, please, wait for me?"

Finally the horse gives in, making her giggle with his dramatic series of stomping away from her. His stance stiffens, showing off his palace guard prowess, and she waves him goodbye before ducking into the unearthed secret passageway.

Her once flawless dress musses up immediately through the gravel, and she crawls on hands and knees up the tunnel. It gets steep and senseless just before breaking off into a rickety ladder – she remembers all of this, having had to climb out this way with Eugene and his mangled hand. She tries not to see the streaks of his blood spattering flakes on the rungs.

It doesn't yet scare her, but she fears the ease may be short-lived.

Finally the ceiling closes over her. She raises a hand and pushes against the upper platform – a slit of light widens with the music of gravelly scraping, and when she pokes her head out, she's feeling apprehensive deep in her stomach.

It's bright.

She shouldn't be surprised – of course it is, that's how she always remembered it, sunlight glimmering from the walls and framed with flowers and spotless spick and span shining – but when this angle on the floor reminds her so starkly of the exact moment she left it forever, she can't help but find herself expecting darkness. Instead, the rays of sun stream in like spilled paint, luminescent. It's completely clean, and the chains she couldn't untie at the time are gone. Her hair is gone.

Rapunzel climbs out of the escape, and the floor feels so strange being separated from her with these shoes. She hesitates not at all to kick them off – the tiles are the most familiar thing to her. Fishbone grooves, smooth as ice, pinks and purples and yellows in cute patterns that she never before thought of where they came from. She may have repainted them in different seasonal hues every year, but the stones were put down in ivy swirls by Gothel.

She continues through the tower – she sees the model where she used to make her dresses, the clothing hook by the window that always held two cloaks as if one day Rapunzel might actually be granted the permission to be outside. The mirror sits royally in the corner, but all the broken glass has been pulled from it so instead it looks like another easel of hers. One final canvas for her to leave her mark.

There is one thing even stranger. She has seen this place empty plenty enough times, but she has never felt it be so cold. As she looks up, she sees that the ceiling is swathed with the poetry of silver ice, and a swipe of her fingers over the counter tells her that this is _snow _that is not melting under the sun.

It never snowed in here.

She catches sight of a trail of snow – it mixes with threads of ice, first appearing above the window, then sliding across the wall, darting, flowing like a stream, until it vanishes into her room.

She follows it, and there she finds something on her bed that stops her dead.

He is curled up like a sun-bathing cat, softly iridescent white fingers bent up to his chin. His sweater is navy, a wave of evening sea with tides flirting around his neck and wrists, bunching at his shoulders, warm in place of blankets. The ocean splits at the base of his back, a crescent of silky opal shadowed with the hollow indents of his spine, peeking between the water and dark scarred pants. His knees are drawn up, his feet bare. The reflection of stars in the sea are thick around his chest, dusting up into his face, pale flecks of the cosmos over his pointed nose and moon-hued skin.

The purple and pinks make him look so dim; his breathing is quiet and fills his slim chest meekly. As she watches, his toes uncurl and tighten like running through a dream - she wonders if he's running to or from.

She's very, very cautious - if she makes a sound, he'll surely wake, and to be honest she doesn't know what she would say to someone so...ethereal. He almost looks like he doesn't exist, just a mirage to blot out the painful emptiness of the room. So she observes him from the archway, perfectly still as if she can camouflage like Pascal. He doesn't look dangerous. He is only asleep, after all, and she knows how nice a long rest feels after a day full of tedious work. She wonders what he's done.

She also wonders how he got here - the window has not been open to visitors for ages, and even _she_ had trouble relocating it in the deep valley of forest.

A long wooden shepherd's crook is laid tight behind him, a withered, twisted contraption which the voice of Mother (that, at some point, managed to gain an autonomous part of her mind) crows to be a potential weapon. But she isn't scared of it. It's glazed with frost like pastry icing and is firmly connected to the boy by threading through his ankles as if they share a labyrinth of veins.

A tiny shiver wriggles up his spine and he curls tighter. His chest expands beneath that stormy sweater, fingers draw in, and his thin bottom lip tucks minutely between his teeth. His eyelashes are so dark against the far-off white of his face.

Her automatic response brings her half a step closer to him - she has always wanted to give things comfort, because her role model gave such a good example - most of the time. A pat on the head, a warm swaddling hug, a soothing song, all the right 'I love you's. She watches this boy who has snuck into the tower and thinks he must have been so lonely to have stayed here - this place is full of grief and memories that are not his.

He shakes again and brings up his knees; a sigh escapes his lips, almost annoyed, which strikes her as weird for someone resting. His breath hitches right after. Another carving of a shiver winds down his back, fast and aimless as water down a window pane.

Why would he want to take part in those memories? Listen to them, have them crawl in his ears and hiss of fallacies and betrayal and shattered, blackened magic?

She wants to leave, maybe, or talk to him, but then the boy's chest stammers again. She realizes - she recognizes - he must be crying in the cusp of sleep. On the fringes of a bad dream or of worse memories. Alone in her dead home, and crying.

Not just anyone came this far to find the monstrous tower, and only those who were escaping climbed up.

She knows a need for comfort, and she knows loneliness, but something in the way he vanished to this single forgotten tower makes her think that he wanted to be left alone. Or maybe, he just expected to be.

Outside, she can't lose thought of him – he feels like so much more to her. She regards the mirror he cleaned, standing there in stoic rest among the snow and hidden rotten blood.

She finds her paints and draws him.

**X**

Jack knows someone is here.

He perhaps didn't detect it earlier, but now that he's snapped himself out of (placid, pathetic) fantasies and he's stopped shaking - he can hear her humming.

And he starts quaking again. He can recognise that voice; he couldn't have been imagining her song when he'd practically danced with her in the tower that day, she's blonde and beautiful and the spirit of spring and life and she's here isn't she she's woken up she's singing and it's meeting his ears with no trace at all of the corpse he'd so feared she'd left behind –

She's at the mirror, her back to him. A brush in her hand, her waist is pinched and tiny and the axle of her eased swinging while her feet, bare as his, step back and forth with a miniature dance to her song. He can recognise her by the way her skirt falls, the way her opposite hand is held at her waist in poise.

Her hair is short, scuffed, and brown.

He's very aware of how dumb his shocked choking sound is, but she turns with a jolt.

In a sharp stroke of a moment, he realises she's painting an image of him, and that her eyes are fixed on his.

God, she's fucking stunning, and so _alive._

He feels weak again, but what comes to his throat is a very strong acidic mix of laughter and tears. He fights himself for a moment – she's the first and last last last and damn it Frost you choreographed how smooth you'd be if something like this ever happened so hold your breath and impress her and let her know she believed in you for a good reason and –

Oh, Jesus, don't fucking cry.

"You see me," he can only manage, discarded misery crawling up again for vengeance. She smiles so gently, emerald eyes drinking him in, and he reads the sympathy and the excitement there – presence, awareness, she can hate him for all he cares but she's _seeing him._

She puts down her brush and skips up to him, and says in the most honest voice, "Of course I can. Sorry if this is a little weird, I mean, this _was_ my home and – " Her head tilts, and the smile she blesses him with next is as luminous as the ones he's been surrounded with for weeks, dreamed about. She laughs a bit nervously. "You're Jack Frost, aren't you?"

And whatever control he had is gone. He presses his hands into his eyes, trying to keep laughing, trying to convince her he can be as light as her, but she's caught him at his lowest. He could hug her, he could yell out with the ecstasy he's certainly feeling, but faced with someone as bright as her all he can find himself doing is goddamn crying.

He snickers dryly, trying to blink away his current crutch. "Sorry, I – I had this whole thing planned, and I promise I'm usually a lot cooler than this, just – " he swallows hard and his shoulders shake hard under the clashing pressure of a spastic laugh and sob, "You caught me during a bad time. Maybe leave and come back and I'll be presentable or – or something."

He can tell she's confused, but apparently she doesn't care enough to let that phase her. She may have lived in a tower for who knew how long but she's so strangely comfortable with pulling him into an embrace; she allows him to wrap his arms defensively around his own chest and try to convince himself that it's okay to touch her. He's still too scared – besides, her hands against his back are enough to make him completely lose himself.

He can tell in the way she's lived and the compassionate smile she gives him once he calms down, that she certainly knows emptiness.

She slips her hands off of him and laces them behind her back. She's even prettier up close, reinvention and purity. She says brightly, "Well, if you want to restart, I can come back into the room."

And he fully laughs this time, the happiest and most relieved he's heard himself in a long time. It's more than the moment where he'd gotten the first kids to smile, when he first woke up and found his powers. It's like the sun has finally found him, beaming vicariously on him and casting the lies of the moon into shadow.

He hugs her hard and lifts her inches off her feet. "This works," he breathes shakily into her hair. She giggles back, holding on to him for support. "This works perfectly."


End file.
